America cannot afford Obama
Barack Obama certainly has the political game figured out. He’s a such wonderful, charismatic speaker that when he speaks, you feel as if he’s speaking only to you. He has made his campaign synonymous with short, positive buzz words like “hope” and “change.” He’ll give a speech detailing a problem our country is facing, then he will say something like: “When I’m President I’m going to bring change to this, because no American should ever have to suffer (insert problem America is facing here).” I make it sound as if he’s a very vague candidate with no idea how to fix the problems he speaks of. In reality he has a lot of plans. In fact, it was pointed out last month that he might be overtly ambitious with his plans.
Barack Obama has detailed, throughout his campaign, speeches and Web site 188 proposals that he believes will make America better. Colorado’s Republican Senator Wayne Allard examined these proposals, added up the numbers and saw the outrageous amount of money that it would cost the American people. Then Allard decided to help Senator Obama, because Obama seems to have difficulty bringing bills to the floor. In his four year Senate career, Obama has only introduced two pieces of legislation, and one of them was the naming of a post office. Allard proposed amendment 4246 which he titled “the Obama Spend-o-Rama.” As reported by Zogby, in this amendment Allard proposed 111 of the 188 Obama proposals verbatim with the proposal costs that the Obama campaign estimated. The total cost of the amendment was 1.4 trillion dollars over the course of five years.
The Democratically controlled Senate voted against this amendment 97-0. This is particularly interesting because one of the Senators that voted against the Obama proposals was named Barack Obama (and yes, I mean the one running for President). In essence, Barack Obama as a Senator doesn’t believe that Barack Obama’s plans as President should actually become law. If there hasn’t been enough irony yet, imagine this: there were 77 proposals that were not included in the amendment; if they were included that would drive up the cost to American taxpayers even more.
This time the political game caught Obama. Barack Obama looks bad for voting against his proposals, but if he had been the only Senator voting for the proposals, he would look even worse. If the vote were 96-1 with every Democrat but Obama voting against Obama’s plans then the popular Illinois Senator would look out of touch with not only the American people but also his own party. If he voted present instead of casting a vote either for or against his proposals then he would still look bad because it would seem that he can’t decide if his ideas are good or bad. And even then he would still look out of place with the American public and his fellow Democrats, because they all voted against it. By voting against it, he can claim publicly that this was an evil Republican ploy meant to bring to light his failures in creating a balanced budget.
Aside from his ridiculous budget that our children and grandchildren will be paying for, I have a few other issues with Obama. First of all, as an anti-war voter, I should be supporting Barack Obama more than Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I view President Bush’s military extremism in Iraq to be the wrong strategy for protecting our nation. Obama has been against the war from the beginning, but I have difficulty understanding how he views America’s role in the world. From the sounds of it, he is willing to preemptively strike a foreign nation. On Aug. 1, 2007, Senator Obama said, according to Reuters, that if Pakistan doesn’t let us in the country to search for terrorists that he would be willing to attack Pakistan. That statement combined with the plan he has outlined on his website to increase the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 make me wonder if he isn’t just as extreme as President Bush when it comes to military affairs.
Second of all, Barack Obama is just a typical Democrat. He talks about being outside the Washington establishment by not accepting corporate funding, but that is a lie. OpenSecrets.org, which tracks Presidential candidate donations, states that he has accepted very large sums of money from the following companies: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Google and Microsoft among many others. Major financial institutions like JP Morgan and Chase Co. and Morgan Stanley are both heavily backing Obama’s campaign with funds as well. Barack Obama has very much fallen victim to the lure of corporate financing that he often condemns.
He’s also a typical Democrat because his voting record in the Senate has been toeing the party line 97 percent of the time. Obama was rated as the most liberal Senator of 2007 by the National Journal. In essence, he is not the consensus builder he likes to claim he is. Very liberal Democrats will greatly appreciate Obama’s extremely liberal record, but moderates of both parties and independents will probably find his record repulsively liberal if they were to examine it.
Could our country survive four years of a Barack Obama Presidency? Probably. Could we afford his 188 proposals? Definitely not.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Apr 4 2008. Filed under Opinion.
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